Retail order management: The key to omnichannel success

Successful retailers have changed their technological operations quickly. While the web store remains an essential component of the equation, more comprehensive strategies prioritize order management. 

After making a purchase, you need to locate, package, and ship the item. And when your retail firm grows, managing orders becomes more difficult. 

You might be able to run the entire project from your home or a store stockroom at first. However, as your company grows, you'll begin working with fulfillment centers and adding additional people and technology.

What should a retailer do? 

Take a big picture approach to your IT strategy and enlist the help of a cross-functional team to make key decisions. Order management is a critical enabler for the CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, and VPs of Ecommerce, Store Operations, and Supply Chain to achieve their strategic goals. 

Consider your options: 

1. Various cost-effective options may be available, but they should all be reviewed to see if they properly fulfill your growth goals and omnichannel plans. 
2. On the other hand, major enterprise-class systems are available in the market that offers a comprehensive set of features. However, these are often designed to handle order management across multiple verticals, resulting in unnecessary complexity and a lack of retail-specific improvements. 
3. Take a look up at the sky. Extensibility and high scalability are possible with cloud-based solutions while maintaining existing IT investments. The time to market is reduced, and maintenance costs are reduced. 

Flexibility, modularity, time-to-market, ongoing cost-of-ownership with scale and the proper feature set and roadmap focused on achieving omnichannel retail success with consultative skills and analytics will be the best option.

What is an order management system (OMS)?

Getting a customer's order from your possession to theirs is known as order management. It includes the item's processing and shipment. 

To rapidly scale your retail firm, it's crucial to adopt an efficient order management procedure. It may become impossible to profitably fulfill more than a certain number of orders with a mostly manual order management procedure. 

A suitable order management procedure, in addition to scalability, will ultimately enable you: 

• Make fewer errors in order fulfillment and deliver items on the schedule. 
• Increase your client's faith in your brand by providing package tracking visibility. 
• Organize your inventory better.

Implementation goals of retail order management system

Keep track of inventory by channel

An order management system (OMS) assists retailers in managing inventories across numerous sales channels. It's a product aimed at the 43 percent of e-commerce businesses that want to improve their inventory management in the next two years.

You can: 

• Refresh inventory levels across all sales channels.
• Determine which SKUs perform best in each channel and refill accordingly. 
• Browse the most popular products by area or track.

Organize customer data

OMS serves as a CRM platform. Merchants can use one to obtain all information about a customer, including previous orders, lifetime value, and location. 

Because an OMS provides retailers with access to their consumer data, they may hyper-personalize any marketing messages they send to customers to close another sale.

Automate order fulfillment

Modern OMSs view the entire supply chain as a connected ecosystem, allowing businesses to automate internal procedures from the order through fulfillment. 

Ecommerce merchants can use an order management system (OMS) to:

• Speed up the processing, picking, and shipping of orders.
• Accept payments regardless of order currency or shipment location. 
• Send order data to distributors or third-party logistics providers for fulfillment. 
• If you're completing purchases in-house, print shipping labels automatically.

Combine financial and order information

One of the most important aspects of running an e-commerce business is determining whether you're earning a profit—and if so, where and how—to focus on making more. 

Most OMSs can interact with various back-office operations, especially your accounting software. The platform can take data from your accounting program to combine inventory and sales data. Accounts payable and receivable will be analyzed, and invoice and purchase order preparation will be automated. There's no need to enter data manually.

Reverse logistics management

Your e-commerce business can deliver a hassle-free returns experience for everyone involved with an order management system. 

If a consumer has to return things, an OMS can produce return labels automatically. Depending on the customer's location, the return address will vary from parcel to parcel, allowing you to collect and process reimbursements in as little time as possible. Customers can also use online tracking information to learn about the progress of their returns. 

Related: Automated Replenishment System in Grocery

Furthermore, customer care representatives have quick access to information on the product(s) that a customer has sent. Regardless of what, how, or where they purchased a product, everyone receives the same quality of care.

Improve your multichannel strategy 

Omnichannel sales account for 10-20% of retail sales, and most retailers confront similar fulfillment issues. Here are some best practices for those who have previously implemented an OMS in your distribution process and want to take your omnichannel strategy to the next level. 

• Align the customer experience online and in-store: Ensure that consumer data is shared across all channels and is accessible to all employees, whether in-store or online. You can expedite the shopping trip and provide relevant content and offers by having a single view of your customers' preferences, order history, and account information. 
• Utilize real-time inventory visibility: One of the most valuable features of an OMS is tracking inventory in real-time. Utilize this e-commerce superpower by providing precise, tailored product selections based on item location and availability, shopper time-to-fulfillment, and customer preferences. 
• Distributed order routing helps you fill orders faster: A modern OMS's powerful order routing engine allows you to combine and prioritize your fulfillment locations conveniently. Customers are delighted because their items arrive promptly, and you save money by using a more efficient fulfillment process.

Implementing the concept of omnichannel is more difficult than it seems at first glance. First of all, you have to synchronize the IT systems responsible for each channel. Otherwise, there will be no connection between communication channels. You can avoid these difficulties by implementing an automation platform with omnichannel support. This will solve problems with product content management and order processing on different sites.

AI-powered solution for building an efficient system of inventory management

Explore the LEAFIO

Leafio Inventory Optimization management system will be an excellent solution for managing an omnichannel business model. With this cloud solution, you can take your business to the next level of stock managing, which, in turn:

• supply chain-related automation of business processes at each stage;
• unleash human resources for better work with stock;
• use of the analytical module for a comprehensive understanding of the business and building a development strategy.

Conclusion 

Order management is essential for delivering orders to customers and developing your business. Don't squander time putting together an effective method. Try the LEAFIO today to keep track of all your orders across numerous channels.